On My Journey of Faith: I Began with the Person of Jesus

My faith journey commenced with the person of Jesus Christ. I first had to answer this question: Is the report about who Jesus claimed to be, true?

 The report is that He claimed to be equal with God (“He who has seen Me has seen the Father” [John 14:9]). As well, He also reported that He would be raised from the dead on the third day. So, was He God incarnate, and did God the Father raise Him from the dead? That’s the agreed-upon narrative in all four Gospels of the life of Christ.

I had to answer: Is that story fabricated, or did a carpenter from Nazareth actually make the claim that He was God? I concluded that He did in fact make these claims. He could’ve been wrong in His self-assessment, but that was the message He communicated.

Of course, I could not prove that He was God. I could only be fairly certain that this man from Nazareth made these assertions. This was His self-assessment, and He spoke of His death by crucifixion and that on the third day He would rise from the dead.

Okay, So Jesus Said These Things—Now What?

Then came the next hurdle in my faith. Jesus could have been deluded about Himself, or perhaps the authors made up the story to deify Jesus. However, those arguments did not persuade me. Jesus Christ is the most influential person who ever lived, and our date itself, 2023 at the time of this writing, bears witness to that historical fact. I did not see this as a leap of faith but a reasonable conclusion that He said what the writers purported He said, and I believed it was true. I’m not alone in that belief either. There have been many extremely intelligent people who’ve had the same belief.

Once I believed that God the Father raised Him from the dead, since a supernatural God can do supernatural things (and I studied the historical evidence for the resurrection, which proved compelling to me), I did not find it difficult to believe that other supernatural interventions related to Jesus could have happened.

I did not stumble over such reports of miracles like these:

• The virgin birth of Jesus (Matthew 1:18-25)
• The voice from heaven at Jesus’ baptism (Matthew 3:13-17)
• Jesus’ turning water into wine (John 2)
• Healing the centurion’s servant (Matthew 8:5-13)
• Calming the storm (Matthew 8:23-27)
• Healing the paralytic (Matthew 9:1-8)
• Healing the woman with the issue of blood (Matthew 9:20-22)
• Raising Jairus’s daughter (Matthew 9:18-26)
• Healing the blind men (Matthew 9:27-31)
• Healing the man with a withered hand (Matthew 12:9-14)
• Feeding the 5,000 (Matthew 14:13-21)
• Walking on water (Matthew 14:22-33)
• Healing the blind Bartimaeus (Matthew 20:29-34)
• Healing the woman with a spirit of infirmity (Luke 13:10-17)
• Healing the ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19)
• Casting out demons (multiple instances)
• Raising Lazarus from the dead (John 11)
• The Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1-9)
• The resurrection of Jesus (Matthew 28; Mark 16; Luke 24; John 20)
• The ascension of Jesus (Acts 1)

For me, the testimony in the Gospels revealed a God intervening in miraculous ways in people’s lives. The kingdom of God that Jesus preached operated outside the scope of normal human experience.

Enlightened rationalist Thomas Jefferson cut out the miracles in the Gospels in creating his own Bible, “The Jefferson Bible.” The morality of Jesus is what enthralled him, not so much the miracles of Jesus. For naturalists, miracles don’t happen, so in their rational way of thinking, the writers fabricated the report, probably to deify Jesus.

Of course, disconnecting the practices and preaching of Jesus from the purported power of Jesus is comparable to peeling an onion. Peeling away the layers of miracles is next to impossible. It is equal to a surgeon sewing a patient back up when realizing cancer has intertwined with the vital organs, making that separation impossible. The message and miracles of Jesus are too closely connected. 

Furthermore, the parables Jesus told are understood to be stories with a moral. The miracles are not recorded to portray a moral lesson but to convey the shock and awe over the miracle!

For me, the question arose: What is moral about making up stories about miracles while claiming they are true? That’s disingenuous. As I studied the four Gospels penned by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, I recognized that they do not argue that all parables were necessarily historical accounts. After all, they were parables! But in writing of the miracles, that was a different story. They were not spiritualizing when Jesus healed a blind man. Yes, we are spiritually blind, and we can proclaim all of us must see spiritually, but the report of Jesus healing a blind man is the report of Jesus healing a blind man, and blind men had never been healed like this before. The authors clearly distinguish parable from miracle.

The folks in the first century, as people today, were not irrational. Their mamas raised no fools. They did not readily go along with miracles any more than we do. Listen to their response to the healing of a blind man. “Since the beginning of time, it has never been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind” (John 9:32). They knew what was natural and non-natural.

What About Your Faith Journey?

How about you? Should your faith journey begin with critically reviewing what Jesus purportedly said about Himself? Given you conclude He claimed to be God, will you conclude that you believe His self-assessment of being the unique Son of God, that those who see Jesus see the Father? Once you internalize this belief, given you do, will you open your heart and mind to a simple truth: Jesus, our supernatural God, can do supernatural things?

Bottom line, the faith journey begins and continues with Jesus. When you have questions and doubts or seek reassurance on the journey, turn to Jesus. Hebrews 12:2 states, “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith.” I have found, and this may be the point of Hebrews 12, that individuals who do not believe in Jesus or stop believing in Jesus do not focus on Him long enough.